1.

I am a fairly novel character. My father is a pikey (traveller), drug addict, and domestic abuser. My mother is a domestic abuse survivor and a single mother of two children with specific needs. My sibling is a long-term sufferer of a mental health disorder, and I am autistic with a side serving of dyslexia. We were beneficiaries of free school meals (FSM), made a tactical retreat from a seaside town, and had a stepfather with an overly developed sense of duty to another man’s kids. To the surprise of many teachers, I now boast multiple postgraduate degrees at distinction level, a stable professional income, and a strong claim to being middle class.

 

I am thankful to all who supported me and proud of the escape I made from the context I was born into. That said, I don’t know how much of this context is poverty or a symptom thereof, and this, I think, is an issue in discussions around childhood poverty.  Either antecedent perhaps invites the other warmly, leading to a tendency for the poor to be ill and the ill to be poor. However, each has its own identity and unique consequences. But how does a poor child with no external perspective differentiate symptoms of sickness from poverty, abuse from poverty, or even cultural norms from poverty? I suggest they cannot, they are, understandably, not endowed with the ability to separate the comorbidities of poverty into their own streams. This is not an issue that the external observer suffers from; in fact quite the opposite, their challenge is not being able to understand how each of these proximate problems dance with each other.

 

When I have spoken to friends about my childhood, they express less horror about the poverty than they do about the domestic abuse it contained. They may ‘aw’ the idea of my mum receiving ‘free’ chips from her friend who worked at the chippy, but they grimace at the physical violence acted out by a sibling who hears voices, sees ghosts, and feels like a stranger in their own head. Aggression and cruelty have a visceral edge that hunger pangs lack, partly because many can empathise more easily with being a victim of violence than with being permanently hungry or financially anxious.

 

Yet, I think what is more critical is the inability to integrate these pathologies into a single experience of poverty, which is how they are experienced. When asked about a childhood of destitution, the individual does not disentangle the different difficulties experienced. Childhood is holistic, and a childhood of mental health troubles and financial difficulties is always understood as a single substance—a compound that takes considerable effort to atomise. To talk about poverty as an isolated factor involves prying out fundamentally intertwined factors, resulting in an inauthentic treatment of the experience at best and a reconstruction that bears little resemblance to the lived experience at worst.

 

I can’t offer a normative framework for how to discuss these issues in a partitioned or effectively integrated way. Instead, I have a different point to press.

 

2.

I shall not be putting my name to this. It would not be fair to my mother. As suggested, the experience of poverty is closely tied to other factors of disenfranchisement. For the most part—particularly where children are concerned—these factors emanate from others. Who was responsible for my hunger? Society? My mother? Who is the reason for the anxiety I feel when someone knocks at the door? The bailiffs of my childhood? Or the father who taught us to dive behind sofas if an unfamiliar knock rang out?

 

It is a foul thing to ask the poor to describe their childhood. Aside from the upset of trudging through painful memories, putting a name to the description of parenting that elicits derision demands that the former child draws public disdain toward perhaps the only person who made any effort to ensure their safety and security.

 

One might complain, ‘Your mother was clearly a saint, making the best of a bad situation. How could she be condemned?’ One clearly has never heard of the Daily Mail. Descriptions of a difficult childhood are hard for the mothers of that childhood to hear, evoking feelings of guilt, shame, and inadequacy. An attack piled on after years of having shouldered the hardship of living through weeks of beans on toast and cold showers, a decade of fear of imminent homelessness, and the sense of failure that comes with it.

 

She lives this pain and now must endure the double jeopardy of the consequences her child bears, consequences she feels responsible for. Now that once-child is being asked to prostitute their intimate memories of hard times, harming their mother in the process, just so the comfortable may continue to not quite understand. Arrogant, entitled, bollocks.

 

Poverty is not a solo experience. Those memories aren’t exclusively ours and thus are not automatically ours to share. I imagine you would consider it uncouth to ask someone, ‘What is it like to sleep with your spouse?’ Even if you don’t mind sharing, is it fair to your partner to do so? Yet, continue to ask your token chav chum to regale you with experiences of poverty where their mother is left naked for you to judge, pore over, and analyse. Such vivisections seem to me to be an invitation for the once-poor to betray the confidence of those they shared their poverty with.

 

3.

I am sure it is clear that I find talking about the negative aspects of my childhood uncomfortable. It will likely not surprise you that I find it genuinely agonising to read the middle-class analysis of the experience of childhood poverty. It is excruciating to hear descriptions of privation that sound comparatively cushy. A kind of inverse snobbery—a pride swells within. A sentiment of, “You are so blinded by your opulence, you can’t possibly understand genuine scarcity.” This reflex is generally unfair; many suffer even when they haven’t ever ended the day without dinner.

 

The cringe-laden wince that strikes your gut, tainted with a sense of self-righteous ‘you can’t understand’-ness, is a near universal unifying experience, an exemplar of the inverse snobbery I am attempting to illustrate here. I believe this to be the same phenomenon that will strike the soul of the once poor (and/ or abused) as those even only mildly better off describe their difficult times growing up, even if there is an objective awfulness about said experience.

 

The double-edged sword of this lip-curling precious poverty pretension is that it also evokes an insecurity that the listener might have been worse off than you, evoking an anxious fear that perhaps you might seem Sunak-esque in your descriptions of a comparatively comfortable upbringing.

 

And so, I can be rather prickly when people talk about their hard times or inquire about mine. Outside of those close to me, who I feel empowered to cathartically laugh at the ridiculousness of my childhood, that chapter is largely off-limits in general conversation. This is sometimes a bit of a social retardant (could this be an unexplored social consequence of childhood poverty? Someone should write this paper).

 

The consequence is that employers, colleagues, and even friends can often be unaware of the insights you might have into poverty unless the mask slips in a moment of righteous indignation fuelled by that inverse snobbery. And of course, those interviews and PhD applications where preferential hiring and tokenism might have served up an easier advancement come and pass, not wanting to be seen to profit from or ‘show off’ the upbringing you are secretly proud of having had.

 

Author:

 

The author wishes to remain anonymous